Encounters
by Sakon76
Summary: [G1] Crossover with Kamen Rider Kuuga.  Godai's adventure in Oregon, and how Prowl learned to juggle. A young Japanese man, himself more than meets the eye, wanders up the Oregon beach where Prowl is keeping an eye on Decepticon activity...


**Encounters**  
**-or Godai's Adventure in Oregon and How Prowl Learned to Juggle-**  
by K. Stonham  
released 5th November 2007

There was a Japanese police car sitting on the beach observing the waves. Which was a ridiculous thing to say, of course. A car couldn't precisely _observe_ anything; it lacked eyes. And a head. And, really, anything observing a brain, sentience, or the ability to observe. But there it sat, nonetheless, as the sun slowly crept up in the sky behind it.

A young man, himself also of Japanese origin, walked up the beach toward the car. Or, rather, it would be more precise that he was walking in the _direction_ of the car, not actually toward it. He was heading north, and the police car happened to be north of him. This was, in effect, the sum total of the relationship between himself and the car.

He had to have seen it, of course; his gaze flitted about to whatever caught his attention at the moment. And the car, black and white and apparently utterly abandoned on an empty beach in this foreign country, was neither inconspicuous nor hidden from view. So, as he drew closer, it was natural that he began studying the vehicle, head cocked slightly to one side as he wondered what on the desolate stretch of sand warranted its presence. He looked around, turning slowly as he walked to look even behind himself, but saw nothing that would make sense of its presence. Drawing close to the vehicle, he came to a stop.

"Sapporo markings," he noted in his own language, looking at the emblem on the black-and-white's side. He looked at the sand behind it, with a neat set of tire treads leading to the vehicle's current position, then at the sand around of and in front of it, circling as he did so. His own footprints were the only ones to be seen, anything else having long been smoothed by ocean breezes into mindless hills and dunes. "The tire tracks are still fresh... but no driver?" he wondered to himself. He peeked inside the car, where a key was neatly in the ignition, then looked out at sea. But even if the driver had gone swimming or drowned, he reasoned to himself, there would still need to be a set of footprints leading from the car to the water... probably.

Frowning in consideration, Godai Yuusuke shrugged off his backpack and sat down beside the police car, trying to figure out the mystery it presented.

* * *

Prowl kept one set of sensors on the human male who had claimed the patch of sand beside his. The rest of his sensors he trained seaward, toward the offshore suboceanic Decepticon base. All seemed quiet--this particular patrol usually did--but that could change in an instant. Megatron would dispatch his warriors to some target area to attempt to steal energon, and Prowl's warning might be the first and possibly only the Autobots had until Teletran's sensor glitch was recalibrated and corrected. 

The human was lying down on the sand now, Prowl noticed, his head on his backpack and his eyes on the sky with its drifting clouds. Once in a while he raised his arm, sketching some outline that only made sense to himself against a cloud shape. Just once in a while his calm, curious gaze would move back to Prowl himself, and he'd frown thoughtfully for a few minutes before going back to his cloud- or wave- watching.

The morning bled on in to the afternoon and the man stood, stretching a little, and fished a protein bar and a bottle of water out of his backpack, breaking his fast on them. Still nothing happening far out at sea, Prowl thought, and though he should be glad of that, it was always waiting for Megatron to make his move that grated the worst. When things were actually _happening_ time tended to blur, move faster than it should have, as he fought--they all fought--to stay on top of the situation, to stop the Decepticons from despoiling this planet, killing its people, killing their friends, their shipmates, their brothers in arms--

The human walked casually down to the shoreline. Prowl watched, wondering if he was intending to swim. The seawater here was cold for humans, if he recalled correctly, its flow coming straight down the coast from one of the planet's polar ice caps, but the human wasn't removing any of his clothing either, and Prowl had heard humans usually did that prior to hydro-immersion.

The human gazed out at the sea for a few minutes too, then looked down at his feet, studying the debris the waves cast up on the shoreline. Walking a few feet back south, he suddenly smiled and leaned over to pick up a small rock. A few feet further on he found another that suited his purpose, and then another. He collected a dozen, all told, and tucked them into the front pocket of his sweatshirt as he walked back toward where he'd left his possessions by Prowl.

He wondered what the human was going to do with his stones. Use them to smash Prowl's windows in, perhaps? He'd never had it happen before, but he'd heard horror stories from a few other Autobots who had been foolish enough to park overnight in bad parts of Portland. That was, of course, before the locals had figured out that a certain red insignia tended to mean irritated alien robots. But this human didn't seem inclined toward violence; he hadn't done a thing other than sit and observe.

When the human took a stone out of his pocket, though, aimed carefully, and cast it out at the waves, Prowl sat up straight on his shocks, surprised, as the stone _skipped across the surface of the water before it sank_.

The human grinned and skipped another few stones as Prowl calculated out the approximate weight, velocity, and trajectory, trying to figure out how he was doing it. Certain Autobots he could think of would love to be able to duplicate the skill, and anything that kept his crewmates from going stir-crazy, or that might possibly give them the hint of an edge in battle, was prone to be something Prowl approved of.

* * *

Yuusuke grinned, pleased, as his sixth stone managed a perfect seven skips, tying his personal record. Pulling three more of the sea-smoothed rocks out of his pocket, he absently began to juggle them. He should probably resume walking, he thought, since it didn't look like the mystery of the abandoned police car was going to be solving itself anytime soon. There was still plenty of time left in the day, and the map he had indicated the next town was less than ten more miles up the coast... 

"How do you do that?" someone asked in English behind him.

Startled, Yuusuke managed to catch all three of his stones before turning around.

There was no one there. Nothing but his backpack beside the car.

"Do what?" he replied in the same language.

"_That_," the invisible person replied. "With the stones."

Yuusuke walked slowly forward, confused a little. No one was there but him and... the car. He looked at the discreet red symbol on its hood and suddenly realized it was familiar. Remembered _why_ it was familiar. "It's called juggling," he said, addressing the vehicle, trying to remember what the media had said in their reports. Of course, there were so many things the media reported on that it was hard to remember what had been about Ultraman and what had been about other aliens. "You're an... 'Autobot,' aren't you?"

"Yes," the car answered. "My name is Prowl." A moment's hesitation. "You're not from around here, are you?"

"No," Yuusuke answered, an unrealized worry lifting off his shoulders now that the mystery of the car had been resolved. "My name is Yuusuke Godai," he said, giving his name Western-style. "I'm from Japan." He cocked his head to one side, curious. "If you're all based in America, why are you a Japanese police car?"

There was what sounded like an embarrassed cough. "When we were awakened, our computer, Teletran-One, scanned local vehicles to find suitable camouflage alternate modes for us. There was an automotive display going on in Portland at the time, and Sapporo--Portland's sister city in Japan--had loaned the police department one of their own vehicles for the display. Teletran didn't realize at the time that the vehicle was geographically inappropriate."

"You couldn't have changed it later?" Yuusuke inquired.

"I like this model," Prowl said, sounding a bit defensive.

Yuusuke grinned and sat back down on his spot on the sand beside the Autobot. "I have a friend back in Japan who's a policeman," he said. "A detective, actually. Not in Sapporo, though. He's from Nagano, though he was working in Tokyo last year."

"For someone who's not from around here, you don't seem very surprised to be talking with someone from another planet." Prowl sounded puzzled. Yuusuke guessed that maybe Americans weren't used to aliens and monsters existing anywhere but on their television screens.

"I'm from Japan," Yuusuke reiterated. "Weird things happen there all the time. Aliens, demons, earthquakes..." He shrugged nonchalantly. Home had always been that way, even before the weirdness had gotten mixed up in his own personal life. It was always strange to step back and realize things were different elsewhere. "Besides, it's not very nice to freak out at people you've just met," he added chidingly. He took his stones back out of his pocket and considered them. "You've never seen juggling before?" he asked.

* * *

It was so _refreshing_ to deal with a human who didn't gawk or gape or ask stupid questions that Prowl transformed to learn the tricks Yuusuke did with simple rocks. The human was calm and nonplussed and coached him through awkwardness after Prowl had located some rocks of his own, ones sized better to his hands. Yuusuke was apparently used to teaching, and was quite gentle. It was still difficult, learning the patterns; Prowl's logic center had no problem with the patterns, but the apparent uselessness of it threatened to short-circuit his central processing unit. It served no possible _purpose_-- 

"My friend Sakurako-san--she's a graduate student studying archaeology--thinks juggling probably goes back to when humans were still hunter-gatherers," Yuusuke explained, effortlessly moving between sets of patterns himself. "She thought it might be a way to keep more than one weapon in hand and in motion while hunting or defending. And maybe a way to increase manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination, things like that. I should ask her about it when I get home and see if she ever found anything more out."

"That would make sense," Prowl admitted, feeling the strain on his circuits ease. "We never had a 'hunter-gatherer' phase in our cultural history on Cybertron." An explanation provided for the act, he managed a bit more successfully now, though still without the ease and facility that demonstrated the human's long skill with juggling. As he watched, Yuusuke slipped more and more stones from his pocket into his pattern until he was flawlessly handling six stones at once. They flew higher and higher, the patterns he tossed them in growing more and more complex and acrobatic, until finally he caught them all back in his hands and bowed with a flourish. Impressed at his skill, Prowl politely applauded. He'd memorized as many of the patterns as he could, and was looking forward to teaching them to the others. Bluestreak especially, he thought, would be enchanted by the art.

Grinning, Yuusuke threw his stones out across the water again, one by one, skimming the surface until they sank beneath the waves.

"How do you do _that_?" Prowl asked, intrigued again.

"Mm, you just do," Yuusuke replied, miming the action of flicking his wrist, stone in hand. "You just keep level to the water, and keep the stone's flat to it as well."

Aha. The stone's _shape_ mattered. That was the element that had been missing from Prowl's calculations. He looked consideringly at the rocks he held, but decided they were the wrong shape. Ah well, he'd just have to find others later and practice--

His alarms went off as the sensors he'd left trained out to sea, in the direction of the Decepticons' underwater lair, flared to life. "Excuse me," he said, with a nod, and recalibrated his optics. Far, far across the water a pillar rose from the depths and black specks, tiny even in his enhanced vision, took to flight. _**Prowl to the Ark,**_ he radioed back to base. _**A Decepticon party, eight strong, has left their base, headed west-southwest.**_

_**Hear ya loud an' clear, Prowl,**_ Ironhide radioed back. _**Teletran's still got its sensors on the fritz, but we're releasin' SkySpy units now. Get your tail back here and help us figure out what those no-good 'Cons are up to now.**_

_**Will do. Prowl out.**_ He looked back down at the human he'd spent a pleasant few hours with. "I apologize, I have to go--"

Yuusuke just nodded, face somehow unexpectedly serious. "I know how it is," he said. "Good luck." Prowl hesitated, suddenly struck by a thought. The Japanese man had said that unusual events happened more frequently in his home nation. Was it possible that he had been...? The thought, and the logic train leading to it, faltered as Yuusuke dug in his pocket and pulled out a human-sized business card, handing it to Prowl. "Here. If you ever find yourself in Japan, look me up." It was a friendly invitation, and the card held only his name, neat English characters written in pencil below printed kanji, a phone number, and a slogan about being a man who chased dreams, a man of two thousand skills. Prowl took the tiny card carefully and read it over before nodding and subspacing it.

"I will," he said, still wondering. He hesitated again. "I shouldn't abandon you on this beach."

"No, no, it's fine," Yuusuke replied, grinning. "Thanks for the offer, but I've walked here all the way from Mexico. I want to see if I can walk all the way to Canada."

Caught off guard by the strangeness of the quest, Prowl laughed a little. "Well, good luck. It was a pleasure to meet you, Yuusuke Godai."

Yuusuke nodded, and bowed to him. "Aette yokatta, Prowl-san."

A little surprised, and realizing that there were customs and languages on this planet that he hadn't even begun to study yet, Prowl returned the bow and transformed. He kept his sensors on Yuusuke as he did so, and was not surprised to see a grin of pleased wonder on the man's face. It somehow seemed entirely in character. "Until we meet again," he said simply, and left the beach, and the slightly strange, if intriguing, human behind.

* * *

Yuusuke watched as the seeming police car crested the sandy ridge and disappeared from sight. He had a feeling that it was going to be a long time until he could look at a police car again in _quite_ the same way that he had before. 

With a pleased smile on his face, another adventure having been had, he picked up his backpack and slung it over his shoulders. Taking a long look out at the water, but not seeing whatever Prowl had, he shrugged and continued northward.

He wondered what it would be like, to adventure on another planet. He was filled with wonder all the time and he hadn't even finished exploring _this one_ yet!

Humming as he walked north, toward Canada, he started mentally composing his next set of letters home.

* * *

**Author's Notes**

_This all started with wondering why Prowl is a Japanese police car in G1. Then I read on his Teletraan-1 wiki entry that "Prowl's Diaclone predecessor also came with additional optional stickers that would identify him as being part of the police forces from existing Japanese cities, namely 'Tokyo City', 'Sapporo City', 'Sendai City', 'Osaka City' and 'Fukuoka City'" and, remembering something in the back of my brain, researched and found out that Sapporo is indeed Portland's sister city. Which may actually give half an explanation of how this might've come about. And then Godai wandered into my brain in his post-Kuuga adventuring, and... well, there's a reason I have the unofficial title of "Crossover Crack Queen." In any case, I hope you enjoyed the story!_


End file.
